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Williamsburg’s Printing Office sent newspapers, almanacs, books, and other printed matter throughout the Virginia colony.

Colonial Williamsburg

An early photo shows an ox cart on Duke of Gloucester Street passing by the Printing Office building before it was restored.

From left, Will Damron, Kate Kovach, and Dennis Watson, as Alexander Purdie, in the Post Office store, with reproductions for sale.

Colonial Williamsburg

Weather, road conditions, government business, court dates– all were available in an almanac from printer William Hunter.

Colonial Williamsburg

The Williamsburg Printing Office sold everything from novels and Bibles to ledgers, pencils, pens, paper, and playing cards.

Staying Connected before the Age of the Silicon Chip

by Susan Berg

Increasingly, people communicate and find their their information and goods through the Internet. They use personal computers and smart phones, and they like to keep in touch with family and friends, follow the news, maintain a calendar, and buy products
and services. Whether they are getting directions, checking the weather, reading an ebook, or writing a blog, more and more they seek and store their information
in a digital format.

How did eighteenth-century Virginians communicate and stay informed? How did they know when to plant tobacco and grain or where to purchase certain goods? Was there a colonial equivalent to today’s email and ecommerce and to social networks like Facebook and MySpace? What was the Virginia counterpart to such websites as Amazon.com where colonists could buy books and goods, or to the blogosphere, where they could voice their opinions? The Williamsburg Printing Office served all those functions.

Virginia’s first printer, William Nuthead, was
driven from the colony by the General Assembly after
an aborted attempt to set up a press in Jamestown in
1682. Twelve years earlier, Governor William Berkeley
had written:

I thank God, there are no free schools nor printing,
and I hope we shall not have, these hundred
years; for learning has brought disobedience, and
heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has
divulged them. . . . God keep us from both!

It took almost fifty years more to permanently
establish a press in Virginia. Great Britain’s largest
colony was among the last to support a printer.

In 1730, the General Assembly invited Maryland’s
William Parks to come to Williamsburg to print the
laws and journals of the House of Burgesses. Parks
was an able artisan and a savvy businessman. In addition
to printing a collection of the acts of the General
Assembly, not long after arriving he began to publish
short pieces intended to flatter the current governor,
Alexander Spotswood, and to shore up the support that
would allow him to safely expand his operation and explore
business opportunities without fear of expulsion.

Within ten years, Parks had supplemented his annual
salary for publishing the laws by printing a weekly
newspaper, an annual almanac, and monographs.

Starting on August 6, 1736–a Friday–subscribers could read the news from Virginia, other colonies,
and abroad–albeit not in the most timely manner–in
weekly issues of the Virginia Gazette. Parks’s Gazette
also provided a forum for readers to express their
opinions. When one sees the frequency of these short
commentaries, Virginia seemed to be populated with
voluble eighteenth-century bloggers who wrote on subjects
from politics to love. They adopted pseudonyms
appropriate to the times with contrived versions of
classical names such as Criptonimus and Philanthropos
or satirical sobriquets such as Helena Littlewit and
Timothy Touch-Truth.

From Parks’s Virginia Almanack, farmers could
determine when to plant, as well as gather such practical
information as the times and places of fair days and
distances between cities. At 7 1/2 pence, it was priced
to be affordable, though some customers purchased
deluxe editions with blank interleaved pages to keep
journals and appointment calendars.

In 1742, Parks opened a bookstore at the Printing
Office. Printing a book was an expensive enterprise
because of the scarcity of paper, ink, and especially
type. Parks was probably addressing a demand from
his readers when he printed, and later reprinted, John
Tennant’s 1734 work, Every Man His Own Doctor: The Poor Planter’s Physician, and the first cookbook printed
in the English colonies, E. Smith’s 1742 volume, The
Compleat Housewife.

Professors and students at the College of William
and Mary bought books, but so did other Virginians.
Parks imported most of his titles from England and
other colonies. Through advertisements in the Gazette
and Virginia Almanack, colonists learned they could
purchase practical manuals, or such popular religious
tracts as Richard Allestree’s The Whole Duty of Man.

He diversified by selling such printed forms as indentures,
land patents, and tobacco notes–the paper
Virginians used for legal and business transactions,
and currency–and established a Virginia postal route.
Operating from the Printing Office, the postal service
expanded his market and the demand for his products
beyond Williamsburg to the farthest regions of the colony.
Now, when customers visited his shop, they could
send and receive mail while purchasing newspapers,
books, pamphlets, and forms.

With such initiatives, Parks created a market
for information and built a customer base apart
from his seminal client, the General Assembly. A
business created to print the laws of the land had
been transformed into an all-purpose bookstore, post office, stationer’s shop, and publishing house.
By the time Parks died in 1750, his establishment
supported operations that rivaled presses in colonies
such as Massachusetts that had been in business for
more than a hundred years.

How many people were customers, and what did
they buy?

For years, the prevailing view among historians
was that only Virginia’s landed gentry pursued
reading or books, a theory supported by reviewing
estate inventories, which showed some gentlemen
developing libraries.

A study of advertisements in the Virginia Gazette
attempted to identify what kinds of books were
most popular. Advertisements, however, provide an
incomplete picture of the culture, showing what was
available, but not necessarily sold and read.

Two of Parks’s successors provide the best source
with which to analyze the market and determine demand,
discover who the customers were, and identify
which titles made the colonists’ best-seller list.

William Hunter was in charge of the Printing
Office from 1750 to 1760, and Joseph Royle operated
it from 1760 to 1766. Though not as entrepreneurially adventurous as Parks, they sustained the
operations he had begun.

Like other colonial shopowners, Hunter and
Royle recorded sales in account books. Business
transactions in the form of daybooks for the years
1750–52 and 1764–66 survive. Kept to track sales
and show areas of profit or loss, they provide more
insight into the print culture and reading habits of
colonial Virginians than the printers intended.

Hunter’s books show individual credit transactions
and a monthly summary of cash sales. His apprentices
or journeymen recorded the sales in a daily waste book
and transferred the transactions into a monthly ledger,
and Hunter reviewed the figures, occasionally indulging
in whimsy by sketching a “smiley face” underneath
his initials. Royle, who became master of the shop upon
Hunter’s death, recorded only credit transactions. He
tracked them more carefully, however, noting whether
they were made by the buyer in person or indirectly
through a friend, relative, agent, or by letter.

Analyzing the sales alongside such contemporary
sources as the Virginia Gazette, surviving eighteenth century
York County records–the dividing line
between eighteenth-century York and James City
Counties ran along Duke of Gloucester Street–and
other references, we can identify who the customers
were, where they lived, and what part of society they
represented.

For Hunter, the largest group was from
Williamsburg and neighboring James City County and
York County at 38 percent. Customers from the greater
Tidewater area up to the Fall Line near Richmond
made up almost 35 percent. Almost 30 percent of customers
hailed from the Piedmont, Shenandoah Valley,
and Blue Ridge Mountains. Fourteen years later, in
1764, Royle posted a similar geographic distribution for
his clients. The Printing Office on Duke of Gloucester
Street was serving the entire colony.

Though Royle’s sales covered the same geographic
area as Hunter’s, the number of customers in his market
grew 53 percent larger. This increase was greater
than the growth rate of the population in that period,
suggesting that Virginians were developing an appetite
for books and information.

Daybook sales for Hunter and Royle show that
Virginia customers included doctors, merchants,
lawyers, small planters, women, tavern keepers,
craftsmen, and College of William and Mary professors
and students, in addition to burgesses, council
members, justices, landed gentry, and clergy. Although
almost 50 percent of customers came from the upper classes, the rest of society also shopped at
the Printing Office.

Less than half of Royle’s sales were made to buyers
visiting his shop. Busy colonists would order their
books and other Printing Office needs through a letter
or note or would send their sons and other relatives
to purchase them. Women were occasional customers,
and slaves often came to place and fill orders for their
masters. Thomas Jefferson sent his slave Jupiter to
the shop to buy books for him, and Governor Francis
Fauquier and planter Landon Carter sent their slaves
on similar errands.

In this manner, Royle recorded not only who patronized
his shop each day but the elements of Virginia
society meeting there daily. For example, Jefferson
visited the shop thirty times in the two years between
January 1764 and January 1766. He was not only
purchasing books but also picking up letters, buying
stationery, or settling his account. The Printing Office
was a popular place, and on a typical day Jefferson,
the young law student, could have rubbed elbows with
Richard Bland, burgess from Prince George County; Robert Carter Nicholas, treasurer for the colony; and
Speaker of the House John Robinson. He could have
conversed with Priscilla Dawson, the widow of the
Reverend Mr. Thomas Dawson, College of William
and Mary president, who was buying a prayer book,
or greeted such merchants as James Tarpley from
Williamsburg and Alexander Cunninghame from King
George County. He could have waited for the post rider
along with craftsman Edward Charlton and wigmaker
Robert Lyon, and quite possibly stepped aside to let
tavern keeper Jane Vobe, who operated the ordinary
behind the Capitol, buy six dozen packs of the best
playing cards for her customers.

Advertisements list hundreds of titles available
at the Printing Office. The daybooks show
sales of ten thousand volumes. Readers could
select histories, practical manuals, or such literature
as Jonathan Swift’s The Tale of a Tub and John Milton’s
Paradise Lost, as well as contemporary editions
of classical authors.

The most popular book was the Virginia Almanack. Hunter and Royle each sold several thousand
single copies and made gross sales to merchants in the
Piedmont and Shenandoah Valley. This handy calendar
pocketbook could be found throughout the colony.

Sales of other books show a changing focus in
what Virginians were interested in reading. From
1750 to 1752, after almanacs, the next most popular
subjects were, in order: religious works; schoolbooks
such as grammars, spellers, and dictionaries; the
classics; and literature.

Fourteen years later, from 1764 to 1766, political
pamphlets had replaced religion as the top seller, but
grammars and other schoolbooks, such as Thomas
Dyche’s Spelling Dictionary, remained the next most
popular subject, followed by literature and the classics.
Current politics, specifically controversies over taxation
issues with the clergy and the Stamp Act, engaged
colonists' attention, and sales of locally printed pamphlets
on these issues, The Rector Detected and The
Colonel Dismounted, for example, soared.

As craftsmen’s desire for learning increased,
they purchased schoolbooks for themselves and their
children to better their station. While reading classical
authors like Ovid and Phaedrus remained the
hallmark of a gentleman’s education, Virginians also
spent their leisure indulging in contemporary literature,
and sales of novels surpassed those of the classics.
One of the most popular novels sold was John
Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, better
known as Fanny Hill.

Following Royle’s death in 1766, some influential
Virginians decided one printing office could not
meet their needs. Lieutenant Governor Fauquier
said in a letter he wrote to the Board of Trade in
London, “. . . as the press was then thought to be too
complaisant to me, some of the hot burgesses invited
a printer from Maryland. . . .“

By the end of the year, Alexander Purdie and John
Dixon, and competitor William Rind, operated presses
on the Duke of Gloucester Street. In less than ten
years there would be a third press in Williamsburg.

There had been an information revolution in
North America’s most populated colony, one that,
by supporting the exchange of news, facts, opinions,
and thought, helped foster the armed revolution six
years later.